Zhang Wei earned a MA Creative Curating course at Goldsmiths, London. She is Founding Member and Director of Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, and the shop in Beijing. She has realized a number of long-term projects and exhibitions in close collaborations with artists, as part of the research of Vitamin Creative Space. Her daily practice focuses on the shaping of different spaces - Vitamin Creative Space, the shop, Vitamin Blog, and the communities that form around Vitamin and the shop. Curating each of these different spaces, which each require different approaches and can generate different energies, challenges and opens new possibilities of making space in contemporary art and culture. Through the negotiations of independence in the Chinese context in particular, Zhang Wei's practice involves a continuous re-examination of the meaning of public space.

The links below are from our blog. I found them interesting in that they survey practices involving the daily living environment. I found that these individuals open up the complexity of our reality, while also providing some clue as to how to encounter that reality.

Régine Debatty is the founder and editor of the art, design and technology blog we make money not art. She also writes for several European design and art magazines, curates, and speaks about art and technology at various conferences and festivals.

For this list, Régine pulled together her favorite PDF-based resources from the past year.

► Manipulating Reality
To be honest i won't see this one until early January but Strozzina always organizes great shows that integrate tech and non tech-based artworks. Plus, they upload all the essays of their catalogs online.

► Awake Are Only the Spirits
Reason 1: HMKV in ugly Dortmund has the most exciting program of exhibitions and events in Europe. Reason 2 can be summed up in 3 words: Supernatural and technology. Reason 3: The PDF of the exhibition guide is online.

► LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre's press dossiers
Laboral is located in a tiny city in Northern Spain, the closest airport offers about one to two international flights. But the press dossiers of its exhibitions make up for Laboral's deficiency in plane connections. They are available as PDF and are so informative, I sometimes confuse them with the real catalogues.

This essay was originally commissioned by Hordaland Kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre) in Bergen, Norway, to coincide with HC Gilje's solo exhibition blink. Thank you to Mitchell Whitelaw, HC Gilje and Hordaland Kunstsenter for allowing us to republish it to Rhizome News.

HC Gilje's work arises from a moment when the anything-at-all of digital video was just opening up, thanks to a combination of new real-time tools, cheap computing power, and some key interdisciplinary influences. Drawing on experimental sound and music, improvisation and performance became important solutions; working live in a specific situation, artists would gather, process, generate, and recombine material. In work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, from Gilje and his collaborators in 242.pilots, as well as video ensembles such as Granular Synthesis and Skot, the result is abstract and intense, a flow of layered digital texture. In performance it saturates the body and senses; big screens, big speakers. Instead of the narrative transport of cinema, which takes us somewhere else, this work creates - and is created in - an intensified sense of presence, what Gilje calls an "extended now". This methodology is vital; it focuses the open-ended generality of digital media in to a point: on this, rather than anything-at-all.

Helen Thorington is Founder and Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. She is a sound artist and radio producer whose works have been aired internationally and received numerous prestigious awards. Helen has also created compositions for film and dance, including the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company. She has exhibited, performed, published and lectured world-wide.

In this paper, we describe and respond to six common misconceptions about platform studies, an approach to the study of computational creativity.

“Platform studies” is a new focus for the study of digital media, a set of approaches which investigate the underlying computer systems that support creative work. In 2009, the first platform-focused book about creative digital media was published: our Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. This was the first in the new MIT Press Platform Studies series, for which we serve as series editors.

Although platform studies has only recently been introduced as a concept (at the 2007 Digital Arts and Cultures Conference) it has already become popular enough to be misconstrued in a variety of ways in the new media studies community. Detailed citations of these misconceptions are more likely to be offensive than helpful. In the interest of advancing platform studies and allowing us to learn from work that is done along these lines, this paper reviews six recurring misunderstandings about this new concept. We contrast the great potential of focusing on the platform level with these misconceptions.

In so doing, we hope to invite more scholars to do platform studies work and to make this approach even more appealing to even more sorts of readers and authors. We also hope it will advance the discussion of the platform studies concept and will invite substantial, productive, and well-directed criticism of platform studies approaches, aiding in the development of work in this area.

Thirty-two academics, critics and curators weigh in on the category of "contemporary art" in the new issue of October. Each respondent was asked to reply to a prompt, penned by Hal Foster, which suggests that contemporary art's distinction lies in its "very heterogeneity" where practice "seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment." Foster argues that the institutionalization of contemporary art, through the creation of university programs, professorships, etc. devoted to the subject, as well as the dwindling relevancy of terms like "the neo-avant-garde" and "postmodernism" play a role in creating this entity known as "contemporary art." Quite a few of the replies really take Foster to task and it's an excellent read. The only voice missing is that of artists themselves, which I feel could have rounded out the discussion in an interesting way. Free pdf available through the link below.

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.....

......The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

Since his first Apparition on Tournez Manege (1993), Matthieu Laurette has been developing an ongoing series of what he calls 'Apparitions' on TV and in the media. (In French, the word apparition means both 'apparition' and 'appearances'). For Pandora's Sound Box, Laurette will develop a new performative series of Apparitions, airing on various American national TV channels from October 27 through November 1st, and continuously on the Video Box in White Box's exterior window. For the opening on November 2nd, Matthieu Laurette will conceive a site-specific related performative event.

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word
itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots -
the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics
was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as
the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the
machine.” Words like "control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but
at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics
is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a
living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980.
Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena,
with varying degrees of success - factories, societies, machines,
ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived
inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be
one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its
theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an
array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably
infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for
example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the
studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the
1970s.

Image: Front of Office of Collective Play, the temporary storefront space that will be used for programming during "Descent to Revolution"

Last Thursday, the new exhibition “Descent to Revolution” organized by Columbus College of Art & Design’s Bureau for Open Culture opened in Columbus, Ohio. Taking place around the city and at a temporary location in a former storefront downtown, “Descent to Revolution” will host residencies by five artist collectives and collaboratives over the course of the next three months. These groups will take up projects that engage and respond to the city of Columbus. The first resident is Portland-based collective Red76, followed by Claire Fontaine, Learning Site, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, and Tercerunquinto. “Descent to Revolution” curator and the director of exhibitions for the Bureau for Open Culture James Voorhies took a moment to answer a few questions about the show. You can follow the exhibition as it develops through the "Descent to Revolution" blog, here. - Ceci Moss

It seems like the multidisciplinary and fluid nature of the exhibitory framework for "Descent to Revolution" is a natural extension of the Bureau for Open Culture's activities and ethos. I am wondering if you can speak more about the Bureau for Open Culture itself and how the space came into being.

Yes. "Descent to Revolution" is, in a way, a culmination of some of the underlying ideas of what we're doing at the Bureau for Open Culture. The Bureau for Open Culture was created as a way to give shape to the exhibition program I've been operating since 2006. Many of the projects we've organized have taken place outside of the gallery or had components outside of it and often involved participants from diverse disciplines and locations like libraries, non-profit music venues, city-owned sites, empty storefronts and other area universities ...